RE: legend of Greyfriar's Bobby

From: Scott Chase (ecphoric@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu 26 Jan 2006 - 13:57:55 GMT

  • Next message: Chris Taylor: "Re: legend of Greyfriar's Bobby"

    >From: "Price, Ilfryn" <I.Price@shu.ac.uk>
    >Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    >To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
    >Subject: RE: legend of Greyfriar's Bobby
    >Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 13:18:38 -0000
    >
    >These may be 'pre urban' legends
    >
    I tried snopes with no luck using "greyfriar", "greyfriar's", and "skye" as keywords. "terrier" produces some hits but not anything to do with the
    "Greyfriar's Bobby" legend. I wonder how much truth is in the legend. Was there anything to the story that got it started and perhaps embellished a bit?

    Beyond the truth status, my main concern is the emotional impact of such stories, regardless of veracity. After reading MacLean's Triune stuff, I'm still not fond of his oversimplified general theory, but he did get me thinking more deeply about emotion and its neural correlates. Why did I get choked up seeing a dog depicted sitting at its master's gravesite?
    >
    >Another is the dog that sat on the tuckerbox nine miles from Gundagai (NSW
    >Australia)
    >
    >An excerpt from
    >http://goaustralia.about.com/od/nswsightseeing/a/gundagai2.htm
    >
    >"The story of the faithful dog is quite possibly a romanticised version.
    >The refrain from the supposedly original verse about the
    >dog was:
    >
    >Then the dog sat on the Tucker Box
    >Nine miles from Gundagai.
    >
    >But it's been said that in the "actual" original, it wasn't "sat" that the
    >dog did."
    >
    Dogs do have accidents.

    There's been many stories of dogs saving their families, perhaps barking to wake them in case of a fire or seeking help for an injured owner. These things are very popular news for news material. There could be some embellishment in such stories. But why the embellishment? Is there something deeply emotional in such stories that adds to their appeal or relates to a tendency to exaggerate the details?

    =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu 26 Jan 2006 - 14:20:17 GMT